The online qualification round for the Facebook Hacker Cup runs for 72 hours from January 8 16:00 PST (January 9 00:00 UTC). So the clock is ticking and would-be contestants need to get coding and make their submissions.

The Facebook Hacker Cup is an annual worldwide programming competition and is a big event in terms of participation. The competition began in 2011 as a means of identifying top engineering talent for potential employment at Facebook but since then it has grown as people discovered that competing was both fun and challenging, whether or not you are looking for a new job. You are faced with a varied selection of algorithmic problems and how you solve them is up to you - although you need to pay attention to the constraints on the input and your program needs to be able to run within 6 minutes, which is the time limit for uploading you source code and its output.

Competitors need to be registered users of Facebook and also registered for the contest. From posts on the contest's Facebook page there have been problems with registration this year and the advice given is to fill out every field of the form.

The Online Qualification Round ends on January 11, 2016, 4pm PST and all you need to do to proceed to the next stage is to answer one question successfully. There are four and the points available indicate the level of difficulty:

10: Boomerang Constellations

25: High Security

25: The Price is Correct

40: Text editor

The timetable for the rest of the online contest is:

Online Round 1: January 16, 2016, 10am PST - January 17, 2016, 10am PST (24 hours). From this 500 highest scoring competitors, plus any more who have an equivalent score will be selected.

Online Round 2: January 23, 2016 10am PST - 1pm PST (3 hours). The highest scoring 500 competitors will be awarded an official Hacker Cup tee-shirt and the top 100 with proceed.

Online Round 3: January 30, 2016 10am PST - 1pm PST (3 hours) selects the top scoring 25 to participate in the onsite finals take place on March 3, 2016 at Facebook London.

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